Arts & Culture | Film

Amos Kollek is back in New York. Although he has lived in the city “for long periods,” he says, he is now living in Israel full time, and is back for what he suggests is a fool’s errand: supporting the May 4 opening of his latest film, “Chronicling a Crisis.”

For many Jews in the diaspora, the ideal of the kibbutz has always spoken loudly about what the State of Israel was supposed to be. Some of the avatars of modern Zionism would have agreed. After all, they were among the pioneers who created the first kibbutz, just over a century ago, at Degania.

It has been 10 years since Jagger died, and Yossi (Ohad Knoller), his erstwhile commander and lover, hasn’t recovered yet. Now a cardiologist working in Tel Aviv, Yossi is still closeted, living in an emotional straitjacket woven of loneliness, mourning and the fear of being devastated by more tragedy. If only something would change...

The birth and rapid growth of the Tribeca Film Festival, which began its 11th annual run this week, coincides with the artistic explosion of the Israeli film industry, and the two institutions have enjoyed a close and mutually supportive relationship for a decade. This year’s festival showcases several new Israeli films and filmmakers, as well as “Yossi,” Eytan Fox’s long-awaited sequel to “Yossi and Jagger.”

It’s an unprepossessing object, a battered, rather ordinary valise, with a name, date of birth and the German word “Waisenkind” (orphan) painted in broad strokes on its side. But the most neutral objects acquire meaning through association with people and events, and this particular suitcase carries a lot of history along with its meager contents.

The life and thought of Simone Weil present numerous paradoxes and pitfalls for a documentarian brave enough to take her on. She was a secular Jew who was taken with Catholic thought, a pacifist who bore arms in the Spanish Civil War, a member of the Resistance whose final act of defiance was to starve herself, enabling tuberculosis to triumph over her body. It’s a tangled story made more so by the passage of time, which has swept away almost everyone who knew her.